The Last Fix

by K. O. Dahl

  Frank remained on his knees brushing down his trousers and watching Haugom's Mercedes brake into the bend and turn into the ramp leading upwards. The idiot had even managed to drive the wrong way.

  He sighed and got to his feet, then strolled in the direction the car had just taken. This was a subterranean car park and it differed from all of the others in Oslo. This one you had to drive down to exit.

  Frank jogged around the narrow bend Haugom had driven. On the floor above there was the shriek of brakes again. Screaming tyres. Now it was a case of getting to the top before the guy slalomed down at a hundred. He was beginning to pant. He was sprinting. His legs were leaden. The screech of brakes again above him. Frank could see the next level approaching. The opening was ten metres away. The tyres on the car above him were spinning. The engine was roaring. Inside his head, Frank imagined a coke-grey Mercedes hitting him at full speed. He saw his body - spine broken and hips crushed - landing on the car bonnet, rolling out of control towards the front windscreen and on to the roof from which it smacked down on to the floor with the dead weight of all his kilos, banging his skull and smashing it on the concrete.

  Five metres to go. Frank had the taste of blood in his mouth. The sudden sound of a loud crash.

  A collision.

  As Frank reached the top a car door slammed. He stopped and his lungs gasped for air. His pounding heart sounded like thunder in his ears. He tried to regulate his breathing, but could not. The first thing he noticed was a woman standing by the lift. She was holding the hands of two small boys in short trousers. One of them was picking his nose. Sixty metres in front of him he saw Haugom's coke-grey Mercedes. The bonnet had almost carved a parked, small VW Golf into two. A man was staggering along the central aisle. It was Haugom. But there was something wrong. Haugom stood with his knees bent and a surprised expression on his face. He was holding his thigh.

  Frølich set off. 'Stop,' he shouted to Haugom. 'Stand still!'

  He was running. From the corner of his eye he could see the woman with the two children shooing them into the stair well. Haugom's knees gave way. Frank slowed down against his will.

  Erik Haugom was rocking on his knees. 'Stop.' Frølich repeated, gentler this time, and continued walking towards the man who now had a distant, almost dreamy expression on his face. The bent figure fighting to remain upright resembled a spaced- out needle addict. Frølich ground to a halt as the man fell to his knees.

  There were five metres between them as the man let go of his thigh. He was a strange sight. His jacket seemed to be glued to his right thigh.

  'Help me,' whispered Erik Haugom, rolling gently down on to the concrete floor.

  'What's up?' Frølich asked, bending over him. 'Have you been hurt?'

  Haugom's breathing was a strained wheeze. He was fighting for air. His mouth moved. Frank stooped over him. 'In my jacket pocket,' Haugom whispered with a gurgle.

  'What have you got in your jacket?'

  'A hypodermic needle. Take it out.'

  'You've got a syringe in your pocket?'

  Haugom didn't answer. He fell on to his back and tried to straighten up. His face was scarlet; his breathing a barely audible rasp.

  'Well, well, doctor,' Frølich mumbled to the figure on the floor. 'I think you need a medic.' He stood thinking, and alternated between looking at his mobile telephone and Haugom, who was now lying on his side, his fingers shuddering with spasms. 'Where are the medics when you need them?' Frølich asked himself in a low voice.

  * * *

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  The Lost Girl

  They were sitting in Cafe Justisen. They had taken seats at a table in the corner under a photograph of Oslo-born artist Hermansen. Gunnarstranda had just eaten a meatball and fried egg smorgasbord. Now he was washing it down with a cup of black coffee. Fristad and Frølich each had a draught beer.

  'So now at last we can do what we should have done a long time ago,' Fristad said with a tiny smile followed by a broad grin. 'We shelve the case for lack of evidence. What did he have in the syringe by the way?'

  Gunnarstranda glanced up from his coffee. 'A Norwegian killer nurse special. He had left his briefcase in a dirty laundry basket in Bueng's room. The original packaging was in it. Big dose.'

  'Curacit?' Fristad gave a nod of acknowledgement. 'That's what I call suicide with style.'

  'Bad luck I would call it.' Gunnarstranda turned to the other two. 'He didn't have a snowball's hope in hell. The dose of curacit would have paralysed his respiratory organs pretty quickly. The idea had been to kill Bueng. When you turned up at the home I suppose he had the syringe primed and ready in his pocket. It lay there then like an undetonated bomb until the collision in the multi-storey car park. He must have got the whole syringe in his thigh when he smashed into the car. The pathologist had to cut the needle out it was stuck in so far.'

  'Typical,' Frølich said. 'Bloody typical.'

  'What was?'

  'That he was out to paralyse Bueng's respiratory organs. Haugom must have been hooked on asphyxiation. Even the medication he used ended in asphyxiation.'

  Fristad drank his beer and smacked his lips. 'I gather his wife has confessed to the murder of Helene Lockert. Why would the husband set out on this trail of murders?'

  Police Inspector Gunnarstranda took his time. 'It seems he never believed she would confess,' he said at length. 'The truth about the Lockert woman's death had bound them together for good or ill for years. He had a hold over her. She claims he abused her, but she didn't dare to report him because he threatened he would tell all he knew about her killing of Helene

  Lockert. That Saturday… Sigrid Haugom had barely finished listening to what Katrine had told her before she told her husband about the phone conversation. Neither of them knew what to do. Not until Katrine fell ill at the party. Haugom's motive for killing Katrine was to prevent the Lockert case from being solved.'

  Gunnarstranda chewed, swallowed and went on: 'As soon as Katrine knew who her biological mother was, it was just a question of time before she would start digging up the past. Sigrid's name would have popped up sooner or later. According to Sigrid, her husband feared her reprisals and was concerned about his own status. Sigrid's defence in a court case would have been to go for mitigating circumstances, in other words, to embroider on what a psychopathic animal of a husband she had tolerated. With her inside, he would have lost the hold he had over her. She would have reported him for abuse and nothing would have stopped her. In this way she would have had her revenge for all the humiliations to which he had subjected her over the years.

  'Sigrid's role in Katrine's murder boils down to her call to her husband when Katrine fell ill at the party. He drove over and saw her walking in the middle of the road. He saw her jump into Henning Kramer's car. We will never know what his thoughts were at that time - whether he had already decided to throttle her, I mean. In any case, he followed them. He had claimed to his wife that he had followed them to talk to Katrine. Whether she believed that, I don't know.'

  'But he must have been spying on them for several hours,' Fristad said. 'He can't have been intending to talk if he had stalked them for such a long, long time.'

  'At any rate he can't have been intending to talk when he struck,' Frølich said. 'His upper body is covered in scratch marks. So he must have taken his clothes off before he attacked her. And so the murder must have been premeditated. He approached her naked so as not to leave clues on her body.'

  'Did he go straight up and strangle her?'

  'Yes, he did,' Frølich said.

  'How come he didn't get any scratches on his face?'

  'We found a mask in the car boot,' Frølich said. 'A kind of SM leather thing, with a zip in front of the mouth and so on. He must have looked a terrible sight - no clothes and a face like Hannibal the Cannibal.'

  'Poor girl,' Fristad gasped.

  'Girls,' Gunnarstranda amended. 'Poor girls. The mask was not unknown to his wife, either.' They sat s
taring into middle distance. Gunnarstranda unwrapped a sugar lump and put it in his mouth. He sipped coffee and sucked the sugar lump. 'Sigrid said she felt Henning Kramer was watching her,' he continued. 'But she didn't know why. She didn't know that Henning had seen Haugom in Voksenkollveien. Henning couldn't figure out why Sigrid had been picked up at four in the morning by her husband, but he had seen the man in his car when he went to collect Katrine.'

  'She might be an accessory,' Fristad concluded. 'She ought to be charged.'

  Gunnarstranda shrugged and drank more coffee. 'I don't think so. Sigrid maintains she didn't tell her husband any of this. She visited Bueng on Sunday, of course, before she knew that Katrine was dead. She visited Bueng because she feared Katrine would discover his existence and thereby find out the truth about the murder of her mother. Haugom, for his part, posted Katrine's jewellery to Skau in an attempt to pin the blame on him. What happened afterwards was that Henning phoned their house and asked to meet Haugom. On Wednesday. After the funeral, after Frølich had questioned Haugom in the office.'

  'Haugom did meet Henning,' Frølich said laconically. 'The guy is the dutiful type.'

  'We don't know if Haugom drugged Henning, but it's very likely, anyway. Then he hanged him from the ceiling.'

  'Helluva guy,' Fristad said with a brief nod to two solicitors on their way out.

  'Yes, it was clever. The so-called suicide almost made us decide to shelve the case.'

  'Us?' Fristad laughed aloud. 'You, Gunnarstranda, you almost shelved the case. Unless I am much mistaken, I urged you to keep going.'

  Gunnarstranda put another sugar lump on his tongue and sipped coffee in silence.

  Fristad was still grinning and grimacing.

  Gunnarstranda watched him from beneath heavy eyelids until the man's convulsions were over. Then he said: 'Sigrid had suspected her husband for a long time, but only understood the precise circumstances when Henning died. That led to some terrible fights between them. Which led to her taking sick leave and in the end telling her husband that she had visited Bueng at the nursing home.'

  They sat looking into the air again. Frølich raised his arm and signalled the waitress with two fingers. She immediately brought two more beers on a tray.

  'So Bueng was the final threat,' Fristad said in an earnest voice. 'The motive for killing the girl was to prevent the Lockert case from being solved. Henning was killed to cover up the first crime. The same motive triggered the attempt on Bueng's life.'

  Gunnarstranda nodded. He turned to Frølich. 'At some point you could…' He bent down for a brown leather briefcase and put it on the table. He undid two zips and opened the briefcase to take out a green notebook. '… take this to Katrine Bratterud's mother,' he said, passing it to Frølich. 'I'm sure she would be happy to have it.'

  'What is it?' Frølich asked, examining the notebook with interest.

  'Her daughter,' Gunnarstranda said with a weary smile. 'The daughter she lost when her husband died.'

  Table of Contents

  PART 1

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  PART 2

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  PART 3

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight